Yolanda Vargas wants to tell the family of Police Officer Dennis Guerra that she owes him her life.
“Police Officer Guerra died trying to save my life and the life of my daughter and her boyfriend,” said Vargas, 45, who lives on the 13th floor of 2007 Surf Ave. in Coney Island, where a mattress fire roared in the hall directly outside her steel door on Sunday.
“I want Police Officer Guerra’s family to know that if it were not for him, I would be dead right now,” she says. “I feel so bad for his family. He leaves behind four children. I have three kids, so I can imagine how awful it must be.”
Guerra, who was one of two cops to answer the first 911 calls that day, died Wednesday at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx from the smoke inhalation he suffered trying to protect the families of this public housing building.
Marcell Dockery, 16, has been charged with torching the mattress.
“Police Officer Guerra was a very brave man doing his job of saving lives of people like me that day,” Vargas said Wednesday. “I will be eternally thankful. I said to my husband (Tuesday) that we should go to his hospital room with flowers to try to thank him personally. Then this morning I heard he died and I cried. I feel so, so sad.”
Vargas walked through her tidy apartment as her dogs, Duchess and Pebbles, traipsed at her heels. She pointed to an area above her new steel door where the scorched outline of a crucifix stood out.
“I was sitting over there on the couch on Sunday watching TV with my daughter Joanna, who is 25, and her boyfriend, Louis,” she says. “I heard a loud knock on the lower part of my door, down here, a few feet from the floor. I heard the voice of a kid named Marcell Dockery, whose aunt lives down the hall, shout, ‘Hey! There’s a fire out here!’ I ran to the door. I looked through the peephole. All I could see was a giant red-and-orange glow. And black, black smoke. The fire was alive, breathing, swirling around, like from the mouth of a dragon.”
Vargas said she turned and ordered her daughter and Louis into the rear bedroom.
The 13th floor hall of 2007 Surf Ave. in Coney Island, Brooklyn, where Officer Dennis Guerra was overcome with smoke from a mattress fire.
Enlarge Jesse Ward for New York Daily News
The 13th-floor hallway is beginning to look brand new after a tragic mattress fire Sunday.
The 13th floor hall of 2007 Surf Ave. in Coney Island, Brooklyn, where Officer Dennis Guerra was overcome with smoke from a mattress fire. A new coat of paint (right) was being applied Wednesday.
“Smoke started curling under the door,” Vargas said. “I wet towels and jammed them against the bottom of the door. More smoke curled up through the top of the door toward my photos of St. Michael and the plastic crucifix of Jesus. I grabbed my bird in her cage and my two dogs. I brought them into the back bedroom. My daughter wanted to open the front door. I remembered that fireman TV ad that says, ‘Don’t open the door.’ I screamed, ‘Don’t open the goddamn door!’ ”
Once in the bedroom, Vargas called 911.
“The operator told me to stay where we were, that two police officers had already reported in that they were on their way to the 13th floor. It was the two cops who came up, Police Officer Guerra and the woman, Police Officer Rodriguez. She’s badly hurt too. She has four kids too. It just breaks my heart.”
She said her daughter Joanna opened the back window overlooking the Brooklyn Cyclones’ MCU Park and the shimmering Atlantic beyond.
“Joanna looked down 13 floors, thinking of jumping,” Vargas said. “Then she started talking about trying to climb down to another floor. We were trapped. There are no fire escapes. Panic sets in. You think crazy things. I told her to wait. Help was on the way.”
Officers Guerra, 38, and Rosa Rodriguez, 36, rode an elevator to the 13th floor and stepped into a suffocating black behemoth of smoke that scorched the walls, floors and ceilings like a corridor to hell.
“That kid, Marcell, who was always so well-mannered, set that mattress on fire in the hallway between my door and my neighbor Ellie Torres’ door,” Vargas said. “Ellie was home with her brother Fred, who is in a wheelchair. They could have died too. All of us could have died because one kid was supposedly bored and decided to light a match and set the mattress on fire.”
She picked up the plastic crucifix that hung above her door during the fire.
“I’m only a little bit religious,” she said. “But this plastic crucifix somehow never melted even though there was a fire-breathing dragon outside my door. It survived. I survived. My daughter survived. Her boyfriend survived. My pets survived.”
She paused and looked at the crucifix.
“It makes me want to pray to thank God,” Vargas said. “I also want to pray for the soul of Police Officer Guerra and for the life of Police Officer Rodriguez. I want to pray for their families, too. I want to go to Police Officer Guerra’s funeral to pay my respects. I owe him at least that much because he died trying to save my life and the lives of all my neighbors.”
Which says it all.
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